Teachers as craftspeople

As much as people proclaim schools operate a “factory model of education,” a teacher in a classroom today is more akin to a 16th century cobbler than a worker in a Nike shoe factory, for better and for worse.

A school principal once described to me the “egg carton problem”: when you look down a school hallway, each classroom is its own isolated world. Administrators can review lesson plans, encourage the use of certain curricula, and pop in to observe classrooms, but teachers enjoy a tremendous amount of autonomy regarding what and how they teach. Teachers are craftspeople: they use their individual experience and expertise - informed by training and tradition - to make decisions about how to teach the particular group of students in front of them. There is much similarity between a teacher-craftsperson wrestling with how to best introduce a new concept to their students and a cobbler-craftsperson wrestling with how to best produce a shoe with a particular piece of leather. And a stark contrast to the hyper-optimized, mass-produced Nike shoe factory.

In some ways, this is exactly what we want: we want teachers who are responsive to each child’s individual humanity, that adapt what and how they are teaching to the unique community of young people that comprises each class. Much of the efficiency of the shoe factory model comes from its ability to guarantee homogeneity in its inputs and to unceremoniously discard any material that is “out of spec.” But every child is not the exact same - nor would we want them to be - which means you can’t run the same lesson in the exact same way in every classroom if you actually want to educate students.

On the other hand, teachers-as-craftspeople is the root cause of many of the challenges that frustrate people about K12 education. Just like hand-crafted shoes, hand-crafted education is labor-intensive and very expensive, with costs rising each year due to Baumol’s cost disease. It relies heavily on the training and expertise of the individual teacher, so great education is dependent on master teachers - who are harder and harder to find given teacher shortages and decreases in teacher retention. It’s almost impossible to guarantee quality or even consistency of output, and any attempts to effect change at scale are frustrated by patchwork implementation in the classroom. Certainly education would be more efficient, less variable, and easier to optimize if a school’s relationship to the student could be as sterile and definite as a factory’s relationship to the shoe.

Beyond its explanatory power in understanding why reform is challenging, this metaphor also helps clarify some aspects of K12 education that seem unusual to outsiders:

• Schools invest tremendous amounts of time and energy in teacher training (referred to as Professional Development), far more than most companies invest in training their employees. This is because the classroom experience is the product that schools offer, and the primary way to improve that experience is to influence the teachers-as-craftspeople who create it.
• There is often quite a lot of tension between teachers and administrators, particularly district administrators: administrators want consistent, reliable quality that is robust to changes in individual teachers, which is at odds with the individual, craftsperson approach of the teacher. This especially flares up in discussions about measuring teacher quality, deciding which curricula to use, and who’s to blame for poor academic outcomes.
• Craftspeople have strong preferences regarding their tools, thus top-down curricular and edtech software rollouts usually see inconsistent, spotty usage. Teachers prefer bottoms-up adoption of both lesson materials (TeachersPayTeachers) and edtech apps. Each teacher is unique, so even products with strong bottoms-up adoption can struggle to get usage when rolled out district-wide.

One of the promises of edtech is that AI or some other technology will allow for education to be both intimately personalized and systemized and scalable; we shall see. In the meantime, understanding that teachers are craftspeople helps towards understanding and solving problems within the education system as it exists today.